Amerra Kesterson (l to r) practices the Chief's inspection of the gun with Ken Bui as the Oakland Police Department's 166th Basic Academy prepares for Graduation Exercise at the Scottish Rite Center on Friday, March 22, 2013 in Oakland, Calif. less

Amerra Kesterson (l to r) practices the Chief's inspection of the gun with Ken Bui as the Oakland Police Department's 166th Basic Academy prepares for Graduation Exercise at the Scottish Rite Center on Friday, ... more

For Daniel Cornejo Valdivia, who grew up in the Fruitvale neighborhood after his parents emigrated from Mexico when he was 7, the path toward becoming an Oakland police officer started three years ago at a street fair.

Then a teenager attending his neighborhood's National Night Out anticrime party, Cornejo Valdivia struck up a conversation with an officer who later mentored him into a job as a volunteer cadet.

On Friday, the 22-year-old was the youngest of 40 recruits to graduate from the Oakland department's first police academy in four years.

"I'm just a regular person trying to help out," Cornejo Valdivia said before Police Chief Howard Jordan pinned a badge on his chest at a ceremony at the Scottish Rite Center. "Yes, it's a uniform and a badge, but at the end of the day, you're still just a human being trying to do a job and trying to make Oakland better."

Mayor Jean Quan welcomed the recruits. "We are very pleased that you are honoring us by working here," she said.

To residents who believe more police officers will make Oakland better, the rookies are desperately needed. They'll bring the force to 649 officers- short of its peak of 837 in December 2008 before budget problems led to scores of layoffs- and they'll patrol a city plagued by the state's highest rate of violent crime. (Most of the new officers will work in Oakland, but two will join the Vallejo force.) The new officers, who completed a grueling six-month academy, represent a young and diverse group, with class members speaking 11 languages including Cambodian, Vietnamese, Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese and Farsi, the chief said. At least one officer is proficient in American Sign Language.

"The presence of this academy has invigorated this department, has motivated a lot of us," Jordan said at the ceremony. "There's a sense of hope, a sense of pride and a sense of honor, to see the transformation from September to now."

In his father's footsteps

The recruits also know their department, under threat of a federal court takeover for its failure to complete a decade-old list of reforms, is viewed as overburdened by some residents and with outright contempt by others.

"In this career, I can't take it personally," said Brent Lowe, 26, the academy's valedictorian. "One person's perception of police may come from a bad experience many years ago in their life. I would like to treat them in a positive manner and leave them with a positive impression."

Lowe knows the city and the job. His father, Capt. Frank Lowe, retired from the Oakland department after 28 years in 2006. The younger Lowe lives in downtown Oakland and, as a former paramedic, he has experience responding to shootings and crime scenes across the city.

"It prepared me to work in high-stress situations - and in neighborhoods, and under conditions, that weren't always safe," Lowe said.

Lowe and his fellow rookies will face dangers that, while not unknown to officers in the suburbs, often appear closer to the surface in Oakland.

Four years and a day before Friday's graduation ceremony, a seemingly routine traffic stop in East Oakland turned into the deadliest day in the history of the Police Department, as four officers were shot to death by a rape suspect.

Change agents

It's the kind of violence that has stigmatized Oakland: a reputation that the rookies acknowledged but said they were determined to change.

"I don't ever want people to say, 'I don't want to go to Oakland because I'm in fear,' " said Cedric Remo, 33, of Concord, who graduated Friday. "I want people to feel safe when they walk out their doors and see law enforcement."

Remo, a college football standout at Sacramento State University who put aside NFL dreams to work and raise three daughters - now ages 12, 8 and 6 - said a critical part of his job was to re-engage citizens with officers.

One of the conditions Oakland police must fulfill under a federal court order is to show that they aren't stopping a disproportionate number of nonwhite suspects. That means that while officers in other departments might be patrolling the streets, Oakland's rookies will spend a lot more time filling out paperwork to prove they aren't engaging in racial profiling.

Remo said the recruits simply accept this as proper procedure. "We're coming into this new," he added. "It may be different for someone who has been here 10 or 15 years. But this is how we know how to do it, and we're OK with it. We're moving things forward."

Before most of the rookies hit the streets with a field training officer next week, they'll spend a few more days studying the history of Oakland, taking a four-hour course dedicated to the department's federal oversight and selecting beneficiaries in the morbid task of filling out forms known as the "In the Line of Death" paperwork.

Dangers of the job

Amerra Kesterson, 26, of Vallejo, said the dangers of the job are outweighed by the chance to serve the city. She said she would rely on her experience as a community developer in Asia and Europe, where she served in a nonprofit, when working with residents.

"I learned that we tend to cling to our own culture and what we know," Kesterson said, "but it's more important to understand the perspective of people who live in the community and where they're coming from."

Kesterson views herself as an optimist. But she knows that to a veteran officer working in an understaffed department in a city with major crime problems, all recruits are optimists.

"You can deal with the reality that the world is hard, and you're going to come into difficult situations," she said. "But I don't ever want to lose my perspective in the midst of that. I'm excited about what's ahead. And I'm a little nervous."